Now isn’t this interesting? Well, it is to me, at least.
In my quest to add something to this blog every day, my brain slowed to a trickle in recent days. Yeah, yeah, there was a lot of day-job stuff to do, and I’m still organizing my new home office, and yada yada yada — but a small part of me was thinking, “Maybe all I have in me is 840-odd consecutive entries, maybe I’m running out of gas.”
Then I thought, “Heyyy, one damn minute, admiral — something about this scenario seems familiar.” So I dug back into the blog, and whoop, there it is.
It was exactly one year ago today — Nov. 19, 2021 — that I posted the first of six reruns in a row — posts reprinted from a former incarnation of this blog that I thought were worth repeating.
Well, yes, I thought they were worth repeating, but also I had reached a point where I was thinking, “Maybe all I have in me is 475-odd consecutive entries, maybe I’m running out of gas.”
As I wrote when I finally posted something new again on Nov. 24, “Wow, I hit a wall. Wow, the walls you hit sometimes when you write for a living.”
Now I’m thinking this is just something natural. Maybe something resembling circadian rhythms hurls me against a wall in mid-November. Maybe the stress of preparing the upcoming holiday editions in the day job, the knowledge that I’m again doing nothing during National Novel Writing Month, the end of the year coming up with still no finished novel, and the enormous guilt from all that stuff builds up into a Big Wall.
Realizing that this is nothing new eases some of the anxiety right then and there. I’m not running out of gas, it’s just Nov. 19. I always “got nothing” this time of year. It’s bad news/good news — I got nothing, but I now know that I always run out of steam for a little while in mid-November. It means this is another navel-gazing session instead of a particularly interesting blog post. On the other hand, maybe this is more interesting than I think. It’s not my call whether this is interesting; it’s yours.
Thanks for your patience. Now that the demon is in the process of being exorcised, let’s see what happens tomorrow.
Interesting! And just fyi, your writing keeps me writing, so thank you for that ✨!
That’s one of the reasons writers write, I think: to get other writers writing. Right? I am honored to serve in that role for you.